Relative Volume

2023년 5월 2일

Hello traders,

"There's nothing new on Wall Street" is an age-old saying that still shows its relevance in modern day financial markets; volume still serves as a valuable tool for any trader just as it did for those that came and succeeded before us; in order to succeed in modern day markets one has to take it up a notch and dabble in complicated topics, like math. Now I dunno about you reader but I’m not keen on sitting around all day just to watch numbers on a screen; it’s pretty important to add some color into your life before it becomes dull but how can someone add colors into their trading toolkit as an aid rather than bother? With a bit of help from 3 other amazing open-source indicators you too can become a statistics enjoyer by combining math and colors to make pattern recognition much more intuitive and offering more peace of mind when trading. “Sir but how?”, glad you didn’t ask, it helps with simplifying statistics, in this case a Gaussian bellcurve

“HUH?”, you say? Alright class, Gaussian bellcurves for math dislikers 101 is in session

- Imagine that we have a bunch of numbers that we want to graph. We could just draw a line and plot the numbers on it, but that might not be very interesting.
- Instead, we can use the shape of a bell to show how many of each number we have.
- Let's say we have a lot of people and we want to graph how tall they are. We would start by making a line from the shortest person to the tallest person, and then we would draw the bell shape around the line.
- The bell shape is called a "Gaussian Bell Curve," and it shows us how many people are a certain height.
- In the middle of the bell, where it's the widest, we have the most people who are about average height. As we move to the sides of the bell, the curve gets lower because there are fewer people who are really tall or really short.

The bell curve discussed is the main idea for the candle coloring component of this indicator as being able to analyze the distribution of an entire dataset, in this case volume, can alert us when volume/participation in the market is away from its average using color, and therefore an opportunity could be present. Fair warning, it’s important to not strictly focus on volume as volume is meant to be confluence to the current structure of the market rather than causing tunnel vision.

Why 3 indicators to combine?

It starts with the RVOL by Mik3Christ3ns3n indicator as the backbone by calculating the average volume over a specified period of time, and then compares each new volume value to this average to determine whether it is above or below the average. The indicator then normalizes the volume data and calculates the z-score/standard deviation to determine whether the volume is within normal range or is an anomaly beyond a specified threshold which can also be set into an alert to aid in eyeing possible opportunities.

The code also includes Candle Coloring by Morty as it calculates a function to get the z-score for the size of the candle's body, and then compares it to the z-score for volume to determine whether the body size is a factor in the price action.

Finally, the code plots the anomalies and the normalized volume data on the chart using the first RVOL indicator mentioned, and colors the bars of the chart based on whether they are within normal range or are anomalies which comes from using code from veryfid's relative volume indicator.

Overall, this custom technical indicator is best used to identify unusual changes in trading volume, which may indicate potential price movements in the underlying.

How about some examples?



This first example is for my scalpers wanting to get in and out but not having much of an idea where or let alone how; using a tool like VWAP can be great for determining the area value to execute mean reversion trades once a speculator spots a colored candle anomaly at standard deviation band. Works best when VWAP is flat as it signals lack of conviction from both bulls and bears


This second example is for my fire and forget intraweek swing traders who want to execute a higher timeframe trend-following bias. A speculator starting 2023 off notices that the negative sentiment around Binance from late last year has quieted down and has conviction in upside after BTC began an uptrend as monthly VWAP (right chart) has began sloping up as well as a rally with momentum shown with the blue colored candle so the trader waits wait for a pullback for entry. On the chart to the left of the 4H the speculator notices a pullback into the area of interest to do business so a limit bid is left to enter for continued upside in Bitcoin through January 2023 just by keeping things simple

That’s really the main purpose of this indicator: simplicity of statistics for confluence using volume

Volume precedes price and price moves only for narrative to follow- why wait for your subjective Twitter timeline to give you a biased narrative to trade when you can use objective analysis by combining statistics and colors to allow for a cleaner execution process

“But what about risk management?” Glad you didn’t ask reader!



One last example then, we meet our trend following trader again feeling euphoric so they know profit taking season is coming soon but wants to leave emotion out of it. How to go about it? Same idea as our last trend following example: we see on the 4h chart to the right side shows Bitcoin lose and trade back within the 2nd standard deviation of quarterly VWAP which is telling our speculator that the uptrend has broken on top of which notices on the 30 minute chart on the left that aggressive market buyers have been steadily absorbed by limit sellers on multiple occasions of retesting 30,500 shown with the green colored candles and volume bars below, time to sell.


Turns out that selling was proactive risk management because price dumped thereafter



Hope this explanation gave you some useful insights on using statistics as colors from cherrypicked examples, remember that just because my examples are cherrypicked doesn’t invalidate these concepts at all as the market only does two things, initiate aggressive auctions and respond passively to auctions. This tool makes for seeing where that initiative aggressive activity is happening much simpler to deduce if others will respond to an anomaly of initiative aggressive activity or if the aggression will continue.

If there’s just one thing you take from this- simplicity above all, cheers and good luck